The Olive Tree

A couple of months ago I transplanted an olive tree. I had to. It's about six feet tall and has been that high since we bought the house six years ago, but it's had five years of neglect while the house was in other hands. When we finally moved in last March, the olive was half-covered in ivy and was growing, spindly and grey, in the shade, almost sideways due to the pressure of the world's largest hebe. It did fruit last season: sadly, four olives do not a tapenade make.



So I dug it out, brought it up the hill to a specially created mound near the kitchen garden, straightened it up, staked carefully to try to keep it upright, trimmed just a little, manured and mulched, and stood about staring adoringly.
Then we had an unseasonal hot spell, followed by gale force winds, storms and even hail, and since then things have looked grim. The poor thing started to look ever more silver (as they do under stress - silver being the first step on a possible road to brown and then dead). Then the curled-up brown leaves started appearing. Condition critical.
But we are fighting back, that olive tree and me. I've cut back the light growth that looked as if it was dying back, and it's had two weeks of molly-coddling (seaweed fertiliser, extra soil around the base to counteract the wind, more manure and mulch, plenty of water whenever the law allows). I've even taken to stroking it and whispering encouraging sweet nothings, and planted another olive nearby partly as company and partly as insurance.
It's looking a little better. Condition now stable but still serious. I can't tell you how I know, I just know.
If it ever throws out a new bud I'll notice immediately and then it'll be party time.
Not one for half-measures, I'm now convinced I ought to take up olive growing. Not full-time - yet - but one day and part-time. A few acres in the country, a couple of hundred trees, friends around to help pick, as I have done for others; my own oil and olives year-round.
(The fantasy is spurred on by reading Mort Rosenblum's Olive and spending a couple of years living on Waiheke Island, home to many of NZ's great olive growers and where there is even an annual olive festival.)
As if I haven't got enough going on already.